The chair of the House Homeland Security Committee is calling on Homeland Security and Health and Human Services watchdogs to investigate the Trump administration’s decision to force dozens of separated migrant kids who were supposed to be reunited with their parents to sleep overnight in parked vans last July. One child, NBC News reported, was forced to wait for nearly two days in a van.
The children, ranging in ages from five to 12, had been driven for half an hour by staffers from the nonprofit network BCFS Heath and Human Services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas to be reunited with their parents. “Despite two notifications from HHS that children would be arriving,” committee Chair Bennie Thompson says in a letter to the DHS and HHS inspectors general, “ICE seemingly made no advance accommodations or preparations.”
The result? Child abuse. “Dozens of children were held in vans for up to 39 hours because of a lack of coordination and preparation between the Department of Homeland Security, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Health and Human Services to reunify separated families,” Thompson continues.
Most of the kids were forced to wait nearly 24 hours to see their parents, and one child was forced to wait 39 hours. Forced because ICE reportedly warned BCFS staffers that turning around and just coming back when ICE had its shit together would further delay reunification. Meanwhile, NBC News reported, “ICE officers kept to their regular schedule, clocking out for the day while the parking lot filled with children eager to see their parents again.
“I am writing to request you investigate this incident,” Thompson asks the inspectors general, writing that “it is extremely concerning that nearly a year after the president’s failed zero tolerance policy resulted in at least 5,000 family separations, stories such as this continue to emerge.” Yes, this requires a full investigation and answers; but what these kids also need is justice and accountability, because what the administration did to them was child abuse.